Oct 27, 2013
Well sounds like you had a pretty fantastic week. The other day I saw a cruise ship around here and didn't know that they did cruises around the Marshall Islands, that would be cool to do one day! Life is pretty good over here, nothing to complain about and had a pretty good week, other than the fact that I just wasn't feeling to hot, but just worked through it. We had 2 really good lessons this week, where the spirit was really strong, it's nice to be there when people receive those spiritual confirmations. I love having people explain to me what the spirit feels like, that is such a cool experience and really helps give me more push to help people feel that same spirit that I have felt. One of the hard parts about this mission, is that everyone tends to believe in God and Jesus Christ which is good and helps, but at the same time, they think as long as they pray and go to church somewhere, that it doesn't matter. They don't understand the covenants that they make, or have made and makes things a little bit difficult, so it's really good when they actually recognize the difference between this church and other churches. Dang, your going to make me wait until Christmas to open them, that'll take a lot of patience, but alright I promise I'll wait. Nope there's not a whole lot to jumbo (exploring) in my area, it's just a skinny piece of land almost like the highway of the marshall islands, and also we go into town every week so we don't really have a lot of time to write letters or do anything else other than shop, and play a little bit of sports. Oh well, it's good I like it, this area's p-day's just aren't quite as relaxing but I will try to be better at writing letter's I have one ready to send to Grandma and Grandpa now. It's just hard to find the time, but that's something I've been trying to improve on lately. We don't really have any baptisms scheduled other than maybe a lady in November, we went to a baptism for people last week in a different ward and that was good. I'm able to translate a lot better than I thought I could, which is nice. Still not perfect, and sometimes I get frustrated because people don't understand what I'm saying or I won't understand all of what they are saying, but I'm still learning and just need to continue to be patient. I don't really have any way to keep in contact with my other converts, I'll hear stuff every once and a while, but I haven't heard anything in a while, they apparently haven't been doing that well, which is kind of frustrating to hear. Gossip is kind of a problem here, but we continue to try and do what we can. It's also just hard because the church is still so new here, the key is the youth and getting people to serve honourable missions, that is what will really help the Marshall Islands. In terms of service, we help whoever needs help, gardening, cleaning, husking coconuts whatever we can do. In terms of moving, people don't really do that, if they do they can pack all of there stuff in like 15 minutes and be ready to go, they don't have a whole lot which keeps them humble. The ones that do, usually just stay in the house that they already live in, because it takes a while to make a nice house. Recently I've been trying to teach more like the saviour and teach in the way that he would teach, it's hard sometimes because I realize how truly imperfect I am. It's also hard to find the balance between joking with the marshallese people and studying because if you joke too much, they won't take you seriously but will love you. If you are too serious, they won't listen in the first place. Some Elder's are able to get lot's of baptisms just based on their charismatic personalities and their ability to talk to people, but I realized that's not exactly what I am, and also that's not what I'm here for. Most of the time once that Elder leaves, the people they baptized will fall away and they will lose all of their desire. I'm trying to help people have a more lasting conversion which is not easy to say the least. I understand more about how the Saviour feels when seeing his children not accept him and his teachings, that because of old traditions that have been ingrained. They won't accept the truth and don't do anything to even see if it's true. So I guess I learned more about how our Saviour feels about us when we fall, or when we don't reach our full potential. The scripture this week that I learned a lot from in Companionship study is Jacob 4, the whole chapter, the verses within that chapter just really applied to our investigators and helped a lot this past week, I love that chapter. Verse 16 I think it was really stuck out a lot, and was a helpful verse. A characteristic that I have seen improve is just my ability to talk to people, it's still not perfect and I tend to be a little more shy, but it's easier to just talk to people now, without fear of rejection or anything like that, it's good. I feel like that will help me once I start training, because when I'm training I am going to be doing a lot more talking. I think that's all for the week, have a great week :D
lots of lovin'
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